xsd:float and xsd:int

Hi all, I have a question regarding the desired treatment of
floats and ints within an "OWL-DL" reasoner implementation.

The question is: do their value spaces overlap? (or interleaved rather)

XMLSchema says both float and decimal are different primitive types, but
their semantics are defined mathematically. In addition, integer/int is
a derived
type of decimal limiting only decimal's pattern space. All their order
relations
are also identical.

Since both value spaces are defined mathematically, for example,
1.0^^decimal and 10.0e-1^^float and 1^^int
should be considered identical, and 3.5^^float is considered greater
than 3^^int.

This has implication towards their classification in DL, as well as
querying.
Classes could be inconsistent or satisfiable depending on the treatment
of float and int.
And querying could be restrictive if one needs to know which type was
used in the ontology in order to get the correct (or any) results.

OWL specs says an implementation needs to support only string and
integers,
so if one were to support float as well, which is the desired behaviour?

Cheers

Gary

Gary Ng, PhD           gary.ng@networkinference.com
Senior Software Engineer
Network Inference (Holdings) Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7616 0717 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7616 0701

Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2003 13:34:51 UTC